Increase Aesthetic Medical Practice Revenue: Generate Leads and Optimize the Sales Process

Acara Axiom: Your marketing program generates leads while an optimized sales process maximizes revenue.

Need to grow your aesthetic business? Wish you’re practice was generating an increase of $10K or more each month on the top line of your income statement?

What is the answer? First, strengthen your marketing program and drive more leads; second, tighten your sales process and assure each lead is properly optimized to maximize sales.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Here’s what Acara’s successful clients are measuring and monitoring in their aesthetic medical practices:

1. Track lead source. Implement a tracking system into your marketing program. CallSource is a tracking system that many of Acara’s clients utilize with great success. Through unique telephone numbers it tracks where each lead heard about your practice. (You will still need to ask each caller “how did you learn about our practice” since there are always the leads that call because of a referral and not an ad or other marketing communication).
2. Track lead to consult conversion. Track how many of the leads (telephone and internet) are converted to consultations. Acara Axiom: Do not qualify leads on the phone; focus on converting them to consultations.
3. Track consult to patient conversion. Track how many performed consultations are converted to new patients.
4. Track average purchase per new patient. Track what the average purchase per new patient.

If you have multiple sales consultants at your practice then the above numbers 3 and 4 should be tracked by individual consultant.

Now that you’re measuring these basic, but important, marketing and sales metrics you can begin to monitor the success of any best practice implementation that has an objective to increase your cosmetic medical sales.

Here are a few examples of sales and marketing best practices that Acara oftentimes implements for our clients:

Identify what marketing efforts are working and increase those budgets to drive more leads. Example: if you’re local print ads are successfully driving leads then increase the frequency or possibly run 2 in the same publication one with a focus on body and the other on face. Something to remember when advertising: Keep the message focused; don’t sell your practice, sell results (i.e. permanent fat removal) thus when an ad is focused on the face its generating telephone calls from people (leads) specifically interested the face work listed in the ad (wrinkle reduction, smoother skin, getting rid of age spots, etc.).
Identify your lead capture methodology (i.e. what info prior to passing the call onto the sales consultant, can the receptionist book a consults, etc.) and assure that all personnel answering the phone are fully trained.
Implement a standardized consultation process. Acara has a program titled ASK (aesthetic sales knowledge).
Review the metrics on a weekly basis and coach your team to support their improvement.
Give your sales team incentive to encourage them to do a great job.
Review how you currently package your procedures. Possibly adjusting the protocol to increase the standard number of procedures per package will provide the client more benefit and increase your average patient sale. Dr. Patrick Bitter Jr, a highly regarded cosmetic dermatologist, believes that optimal benefit is achieved after five photofacials. (He also offers an excellent training program that teach his laser techniques.)

All of the above are best practices that have to be implemented with rigor and discipline and a big dose of passion and drive in order to experience success. It doesn’t happen overnight but with consistent implementation you should see a bump in your top line within 6 – 8 weeks.